CJ and I recently led a discussion on the first half of the book The Hip Hop Generation Fights Back. The book explores two youth activism groups in Oakland, California, and considers how growing up in circumstances that make the youth both invisible and heavily criticized affect their approach to activism. In addition, the book explores how the youth perceive the label “activist” in the context of idealized cultural images of activists and the history of the Black Panther Party in Oakland.

We began the discussion by asking the class about the parallels between the way the Black Panther Party is immediately associated with guns, and the characterization of the Black Lives Matter movement by Fox News and President Trump. Early in the book, the author discusses how today’s youth are perceived as “deviants” who need to be constantly supervised. This made me consider the ways mass media operates to discredit and vilify Black movements throughout American history. For example, in the 1950s, then-President Herbert Hoover began a program called Cointelpro, with the goal of “preventing the rise of a Black messiah” and targeting black nationalism. This program continued throughout the 1960s, and was used by the FBI to infiltrate the Black Panther Party and assassinate Fred Hampton in 1969. This is interesting to consider in the context of a clip we found of President Trump prior to the 2016 election, promising to former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly that he would “investigate” the Black Lives Matter movement.

It’s incredibly how quickly politicians and people in power attack movements that seek to make Black communities safer, characterizing them as dangerous and aggressive, while ignoring White power movements. In the case of Herbert Hoover, this meant creating a program that would eventually be used to assassinate leaders of the Black Panthers, a group who provided free breakfast for children and thirteen free health clinics, while ignoring brutal attacks on Black communities by the KKK. For Trump, this means calling for “law and order” – a coded attack against Black Lives Matter – while saying there were “fine people” on both sides of the conflict in Charlottesville that saw a white nationalist drive a car into a crowd of protestors, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

We continued our discussion by questioning the use of the term “activist” and how the students in the book used it. This discussion led to a debate between “slacktivism” and “activism”. Slacktivism, as defined by dictionary.com, is “actions taken to bring about political or social change but requiring only minimal commitment, effort, or risk”. The idea of slacktivism is especially interesting in our social-media obsessed culture, where posts about social movements are everywhere. How can we define “activism” with this in mind? Is someone who reposts things about social movements without actually going to rallies or volunteering an activist? Where do we draw the line between “slacktivism” and “activism”? Most of the class was opposed to the idea of people posting things on social media without actually participating in a movement. However, is doing something better than doing nothing? Despite how irritating it can be to see a hundred posts about the same topic on your social media, what if each post informs a single person? Isn’t that how movements grow? While the change brought about by posting something on social media is negligible, awareness is crucial, because being aware of what’s going on is a step in the right direction, a step toward action and serious change.

Afton and I led a class discussion on the book No Place on the Corner, about the effects of stop-and-frisk policing on communities of color in the Bronx. This reading was extremely interesting, especially in the context of some of the other readings we’ve done, including Crook County and “The Inheritance of the Ghetto”. It was disturbing to see the system come full circle, from New Deal polices that marked primarily Black communities as liabilities, to White flight, to targeted and abusive policing, to corrupt courts. In addition, it shed a light on issues of policing often ignored in the news cycle, and provided context for tragic police shootings of young Black men.

After reading and having a class discussion on Algorithms of Oppression, I realized that COMP-STAT policing, based on computer software designed by former NYPD commissioner William Bratton, is important to consider in the context of biased algorithms. In Algorithms of Oppression, the author notes that no one is free of implicit bias, and computer programmers, knowingly or unknowingly code that bias into their programs. However, the public perceives these programs to be completely objective. This is indeed the case for the COMP-STAT software. Its creator, William Bratton, was recently accused of threatening an officer who had come forward saying he was ordered to arrest minorities (https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-bratton-bronx-quotas-roll-call-20191205-teuunpsiznecxlndk3n6htzxna-story.html) . This officer was assigned to the 40^th precinct in the South Bronx, a precinct discussed in No Place on the Corner. There is potential that Bratton’s implicit bias may have made its way into the software he designed, which now is used to direct NYPD operations.

Regardless of Bratton’s influence, COMP-STAT software, compounded by “unofficial” summons quotas and broken-windows policing, reinforces police officer’s implicit biases. When officers are pushed to meet quotas, they often target minority communities, such as the ones discussed in the book. When unnecessary stops are made, officers put this data into the COMP-STAT system in order to “bloat their numbers”. The COMP-STAT system then makes it seem like some communities (typically minority communities) are committing more crimes than they actually are. Then, police officers use this skewed data to direct their future decision making when stopping people on the street, leading them to stop more people in already over-targeted communities of color. This process is summarized well in the USA Today article “When policing stats do more harm than good” by Joseph Giacalone and Alex Vitale; “All across the country, many of the complaints about excessive and heavy handed policing are driven by unnecessary and counterproductive over-policing in an attempt to ‘get the numbers up’”.

The idea that algorithms are perceived as objective yet inherently biased can be translated to other parts of society. How often do we see a statistic, or a news story, and immediately assume its true? How does this change how we see the world? We see arrest statistics and crime rates all the time, but rarely do we (as a society) question the social algorithms that skew the data. It’s easy to imagine that this is the case with policing in New York. It’s way too easy to look at an institution like a police department and immediately assume that they’re always right, and that they’ll always do the right thing. This assumption only serves to perpetuate racial stereotypes and further alienate and discriminate against communities of color.